Why does any organisation embark on the lengthly and possibly expensive process of acquiring a new system? They don’t do it for fun.
The objective and driving force behind any possible project should be to achieve some measurable business benefits. The benefits may be obvious, or they may be less tangible; but they should be real and measurable. However, if any system is going to be used in practice, it will have to be seen and felt to be useful by its users – if it imposes too much on its users and other stakeholders, it is unlikely to deliver all the benefits that were expected.
When we carry out a requirements capture process, we endeavour to capture all the requirements from all the users and stakeholders, ideally from the most junior employee to the most senior managers, and try to address all the likely aspects of the problem from provision of basic data as inputs to interpretation of the outputs, and consider the likley impact and complexity of implementation and integration with other business systems.
Having captured as wide a range of viewpoints and requirements as is practical, we attempt to sort and classify those requirements to get a clearer picture of the common core (essential) requirements and the optional extras that would be “nice to have”.